Ural Federal University: 75 Russian Students Engage in Information System Vulnerability Hunt
The Ural Federal University hosts the first all-Russian student Cyber Training Competitions in the Urals. They will be held on December 5-7 at the new UrFU campus in Novokoltsovsky as part of the IT Congress and the Forum of the Future exhibition.
“It is significant for the region that we hold such events. As you know, the Urals is the stronghold of the country, an industrial region. And industry means not only jobs but also security. Especially today, when the number of hacker attacks is increasing. This is where you – cybersecurity specialists, white-hat hackers, people who can create a serious shield – come to the fore,” said Dmitry Ionin, the Deputy Governor of the Sverdlovsk region.
The contest involves 75 participants from different regions of the country: Kurgan, Novosibirsk, Orenburg, Tyumen, and Chelyabinsk regions, as well as from St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg. They will be divided into 16 teams. The Red Team, consisting of eight teams, will search for vulnerabilities and try to damage the specially created cybersecurity structure of the company. Another eight teams – the Blue Team – will investigate the incident and eliminate its negative consequences on December 6. The event’s partners were the Ural Security Operations Center, Sber, Kontur, and UDV Group.
“By involving commercial companies in the educational process, we can add a practical component by training students on real field cases. Thus, by involving students in practice from the earliest stages of their education, we create ready specialists who have experience and the necessary knowledge, which means they can react and make decisions quickly,” said Valentin Bogdanov, General Director of Ural SOC.
In addition, about 200 students will participate in the educational program: lectures and workshops on cybersecurity, as well as communication with representatives of the largest IT companies in Russia.
“We as a university need to make the educational process more energetic, so that students want to learn. It is important to bring federal events here – this is what the UrFU campus was created for, it is the center of digital information. That is why events should and will be held here to help Ekaterinburg consolidate its title of the IT capital,” emphasized Ilya Obabkov, Director of the UrFU Engineering School of Information Technologies, Telecommunications and Control Systems.
The competition is supported by the Minister of Digital Development Communications and Mass Communications of the Sverdlovsk region, the UrFU Endowment Fund, and the Ural Cyber Security Community.